Looking for Lightning on the Ridge

On Friday, we were up for an early courtesy pick-up for a half-day guided tour with Black Opal Tours. We toured the local town area and the nearby historic Three-Mile Flat mine area, the site of the early opal miners' settlement. Here is the original Warrangulla Post Office, now home to a miner.

We went up to Lunatic Hill, where several underground miners who were reasonably successful joined their claims together, to open all the ground up using open-cut methods, to reap the rest that they weren't able to get underground.

We saw and learnt about various types of equipment used on the mine fields from the original hand-windlass to the generator-run hoist and buckets to extract the stones from the underground mines ...

.. to the big agitators (usually re-purposed cement mixers) used to gently wash the sandstone off the rocks, to reveal any colour; this is the biggest agitator which takes up to 30 truckloads of rocks (normal-sized agitators take up to 10-15 truckloads).

Also learnt about the local bush-tucker, pointing out saltbush (used to flavour meats and vegies), the native orange tree (not citrus at all - first photo below) and a passionfruit vine (second photo - I think that is what it is called. I don't think it is related to the passionfruit we see in grocery stores - if anyone knows its real name, please let me know); both have edible fruits.

Our guide was multi-talented, demonstrating to us how an opal is cut, rubbed and polished. Also learning about how to tell the difference between crystal opals, doublets and triplets, as well as the man-made opal (while it may sparkle like a natural opal, its patterns don't change and move as you move the piece around in your hand!).

We also visited a couple of local attractions featuring recycled building materials at its best; Amigo's Castle - hand-built with local stones by Italian Vittorio Stefanato who moved to Australia and in the 1970s finally made Lightning Ridge his home (or his castle). He built it using string lines and plumb bobs to keep the walls straight ...

.. and the bottle-house, hand-built in the 1960s by Tex Moeckel, from bottles collected from around town, as well as from Hebel, further north just over the border in Queensland. Apparently from around the 1940s, Hebel once had one of the largest bottle dumps in the country (at one stage measuring 36 feet long and 21 feet wide); glass that was visible by pilots enroute between Sydney and Hong Kong that they used it for navigation (maybe true, but I feel that might be a country yarn!).

As with the community's efforts to get the statue 'Stanley' on its feet, our tour guide talked about the never-ending fundraising efforts that the community undertakes; when faced with a "no", the town gets behind the idea, does whatever it needs to do to raise the funds and makes it happen. Examples include when a request to build a pool got knocked back (no, you can use the "nearby" pool in Walgett!). Now there is an indoor heated pool, an outdoor Olympic sized 50m pool, along with a water theme park, a diving pool and an indoor sports / gym centre. When the free outdoor artesian bore baths were going to be closed down as the facilities were deteriorating, and then re-opened after renovations with a fee charged for use, the community said no to the fee, raised the funds themselves to upgrade the facilities and kept it free for the community and tourists to use.

An additional fundraising effort (over $1.5 million from the community so far) to construct the amazing new Australian Opal Centre, an energy-efficient, two-storey underground building being built inside a former open cut mine.

As well as raising money, our guide also talked about the locals successfully petitioning to keep out big commercial mining, to save the local small-scale mining industry as well as tourism which is now a huge part of the town.

We finished off the tour, with a walk into a former underground mine which had been dug out by hand by one man, and apparently the first tourist attraction in the town, from memory (we heard so much through the day) opening in the 1960s, I think.

This shows the opal level in the rock - the level between two sandstone levels.

Miners use Cyprus pine logs for supporting the roof in the mines, as termites don't like eating Cyprus. The supports are also used to let the miners know when the roof is starting to move (creaks, groans, swelling, and the packers at the top falling out). "Ratters" or thieves watch for people tossing these logs down their mine shafts, as it is an indicator that the mine is being opened up inside as it needs supports; then they go down that shaft at night with their black-light and pick out the opal!

This last photo shows a very blurry sparkle of some opal still in the wall (circled in blue).

Again, after our tour, we finished the day with a wander through the opal festival stalls.

Over the last couple of days, we did spy a couple of the 'stars' from the TV series Outback Opal Hunters; we saw a flash of Rod Manning one of the The Bushmen in a ute driving past us, brothers Isaac and Alex Andreou from the Opal Whisperers and Chris Cheal from Cheal Opal, but the real star was the Cheal's dog!

Thunderstorms (yes, we saw Lightning while we were at the Ridge) overnight and wet and overcast on Saturday, so a day spent relaxing at home (doing digital stuff like writing blogs!). Alas, we don't travel with coat and tie, and cocktail clothes, so no, we're not attending the Opal Queen Ball tonight as part of the festivities, but it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall.